Hi everyone!
We will be looking into the basics of web application development as the next learning topic. This post will focus on an introduction, the required programming languages and suggested text editor to develop a web application.
What is a web application?
Web is commonly known with a name of World Wide Web (WWW) and it is a subset of the internet offering the pages that could be accessed by a Web browser in other word websites that work over the internet.
Application part represents building a computer program available/stored on the web server and sent over the internet through a browser interface to perform a particular function.
The web application development has very structured flowing processes and you can find many resources to learn about those. As a simple term, we can summarize with the following diagram.
If you like to develop a web application (application development stage on the above diagram) , you have to learn three programming languages or coding skills. These three programming languages are known as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the building blocks of the Website building.
If you remember, we went through HTML and CSS basics in my previous posts. As a refreshment, you can go to those posts first before starting to read further.
HTML post : Learning HTML – 123 CODING WITH ME
CSS post : Learning CSS – 123 CODING WITH ME
Let’s refresh our knowledge for those three languages with an summary notes;
HTML – HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it is used to create web pages. Its job is to describe the structure and content of the website by using a series of elements. Those elements will tell a browser ( like Google Chrome, Microsoft EDGE, FireFox etc.) how to show the written text.
CSS – CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is another markup language like HTML, and its main function is to describe the presentation (styling and design) of web pages. CSS could be an external stylesheet so it allows you to create multiple displacements for an HTML web site and give you flexibility to select the different styles on the same page.
JavaScript – It is mostly known with an abbreviation of JS. It is a text based programming language and it is commonly used to build websites, create web applications, games, art, etc. and provides a dynamic behavior by controlling the interactivity on a website. In the coming posts, we will learn about JavaScript basics.
Text Editor -You need a text editor to create your documents/coding and a browser to read and display them. Previously, I said, I am using Sublime software as a text editor in my HTML post. However, I am using Netbeans now for web applications development. It is free, easy to use and allows you to keep each programming directory separately in your project (you might have multiple documents for each language and you can keep them in separate directories under one project) and link them in a structured way within a HTML document. There are many others you may consider to use.
This is a quick introduction for web application development. In the next post, I will go through some of the features that are key to know for JavaScript.
123 CODING WITH ME 